Joshua Lionel Cowen: The Man Who Played with Trains

This is Our American Stories, and our next story is brought to us by a regular contributor, Bill Bryke, who brings us the story of the Lionel train. Here’s Bill with the story.

Once, American railroads dominated popular culture because they were the only means of fast land transportation. Now there are other ways to get there from here; they seem less important, and toy trains share the marginalization of their prototypes. For perhaps a decade after World War II, the technical, managerial, and promotional genius of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel Corporation, made his toy trains a solid part of American middle-class boyhood. In nineteen fifty-two alone, Lionel produced six hundred twenty-two thousand, two hundred nine engines and two million, four hundred sixty thousand, seven hundred sixty-four freight and passenger cars. Ron Hollander’s delightful, lavishly illustrated biography of Cowen and his company, All Aboard, states that Lionel’s nineteen fifty-two production eclipsed the nation’s railroads, which had a mere forty-three thousand locomotives and 1.8 million cars in service. Joshua Lionel Cowen was born on Henry Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side on August twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-seven. He preferred playing ball, bicycling, hiking, and tinkering with mechanical toys to formal education, and soon became fascinated with electricity, its transmission, and its storage in batteries. In the labs at Peter Cooper Institute, he built what may have been, or what he claimed was—Cowen had no false modesty—the first electric doorbell. In eighteen ninety-nine, he patented a device for igniting photographers’ flash powder by using dry cell batteries to heat a wire he used. Cowen then parlayed this into a defense contract to equip twenty-four thousand Navy mines with detonators. His ignorance of armament manufacturing did not stop him. He used mercuric fulminate, a sensitive and powerful explosive. A supplier’s deliverymen told him the company said, “You should always keep a good deal around. It’s better to be dead than maimed.” In nineteen hundred, with twelve thousand dollars in profits, he began manufacturing electrical novelties at twenty-four Murray Street in Lower Manhattan as the Lionel Manufacturing Company. He was twenty-three years old. Business was slow. He invented a battery-powered electric fan. He said it was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. It ran like a dream, and it had only one thing wrong with it: you could stand a foot away from the thing and not feel any breeze. While walking on Cortlandt Street, a few blocks south of his offices, he stopped before Robert Ingersoll’s toy store. Cowen was intrigued by store display windows, though he found most boring, and Ingersoll’s was no exception. It was full of cast iron fire engines, balancing clowns and elephants on wheels, wind-up boats, and a tin locomotive on a pull string, all sitting lifeless. Cowen thought the constant motion of an electric toy might draw a crowd to the window. He looked at the locomotive again. Then he entered the store and sold Ingersoll on the idea that had just come to him on the sidewalk. He soon returned with the first Lionel train, the Electric Express. It looked like an open wooden cigar box on wheels. As Cowen later said, “I sold my first railroad car not as a toy, but as the first animated advertisement in New York outside of sandwichmen and live demonstrators. I sold it for four dollars.” “Well, sir,” The next day he was back for another. The first customer who saw it bought the advertisement instead of the goods. Ingersoll ordered half a dozen more. Other stores ordered them too. Cowen had found his niche. In nineteen oh two, he produced his first electric trolley car. Sold as a set with thirty feet of steel tracks, it cost seven dollars. This was not cheap. An industrial worker’s wages for a six-day week then averaged nine dollars and forty-two cents. In nineteen oh six, he began using three-rail track, which radically simplified electrical transmission. Now, an operator could build an elaborate track layout with turnouts and reversing loops without complicated wiring. A year after that, his catalog listed trolleys, steam and electric locomotives, passenger cars, and freight cars, all brightly painted and lettered for the New York Central, Pennsylvania, Lake Shore, and other railroads. Cowen did not lack competition, but Cowen beat them because he produced a reliable product with an expanding line of accessories and was an audacious promoter, selling his toys as educational because he knew parents needed a rationalization for their purchase. “Knowledge of electricity is valuable not only as a profession, but as an education, whether one is an electrical engineer or a bell hanger.” The kids couldn’t have cared less. By nineteen twelve, Cowen had one hundred and fifty employees. World War I stopped the import of German toy trains, and without serious domestic competition, Lionel became the dominant market player, with its large, lavishly illustrated color catalogs bringing the message to millions. By the late thirties, Cowen’s models of the era’s great locomotives—the New York Central’s Hudson, the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha, and the Jersey Central’s Blue Comet—started, accelerated, slowed, and stopped in response to push-button remote controls. They pulled an endless cascade of boxcars, hopper cars, tank cars, and passenger cars. In nineteen twenty-nine, Cowen unveiled the Transcontinental Limited, which stretched nine feet. It cost one hundred ten dollars, then more than a second-hand Ford Model T car, as Jonnar Are Still Go noted in Metropolitan Corridor, his study of railroads in American culture. Lionel’s catalogs emphasized the trains in their environment: the bridges, stations, signal towers, tunnels, and turntables, all placed among twisting lines of the track. Crossing signals with flashing lights, ringing bells, and descending gates, protected the miniature citizens of Lionel City and Lionelville from onrushing expresses. Expansion was interrupted only by World War II. By nineteen forty-five, most Americans hungered for distractions. Cowen’s vision of America, as reflected in his trains and accessories, struck the exact chord of nostalgia and progress, and the orders poured in. Lionel’s showroom on East Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan held a huge layout with a four-track mainline. Cars coupled and uncoupled. Drawbridges rose and fell, and coal bunkers dumped coal into waiting hopper cars. Cattle herded themselves into and out of stock cars as trains passed through grade crossings. Tiny crossing guards popped from their shacks to wave their lanterns. Whistles, chuffing sounds, and even smoke came out of the locomotives. Cowen, who had handed over Lionel’s presidency to his son, Lawrence, loved to spend hours among the crowds, occasionally providing expert advice to customers. Hollander recounts how Lawrence, who lived at Two Sutton Place, was awakened by his doorbell at six a.m. one Christmas Day. He found two small neighbors in pajamas who asked, “Can you fix our trains?” Understandably, their parents were still asleep. Lawrence, in bathrobe and slippers, followed them up to their apartment. The president of Lionel soon had the trains running. Then he wished the boys a Merry Christmas and padded back downstairs to bed. The good times didn’t last. They never do. From nineteen fifty-three, Lionel’s best year, to nineteen fifty-nine, sales dropped by more than half. It was television. Hollander noted that families got together to watch I Love Lucy, not to wire Lionel’s new ice depot and watch a tiny man push blocks of ice down the open hatch of a toy refrigerator car. It was aging. As kids grew older, they became more interested in Elvis, James Dean, girls, cars, and it was the decline of American railroads. Cowen’s marketing genius had perfectly fit the nation’s mood for perhaps eight years, then suddenly it didn’t. In nineteen fifty-eight, the company lost money for the first time since the Depression. In September nineteen fifty-nine, Lawrence returned from a sales trip to the Far East to learn that his father and sister had sold their shares of stock to a group of businessmen led by Cowen’s great-nephew, Roy Cohn. Cowen paid fifteen dollars for each of his Lionel shares in nineteen fifty-nine. Four years later, he sold them for five dollars and twenty-five cents. Lionel survives to this day, despite a string of bankruptcies and reorganizations. In nineteen ninety-nine, A&E produced an hour-long show ranking the top ten toys of the twentieth century. Lionel was number four, preceded only by the Uar O Yo, crayons, and Barbie. If Cowen had been alive—he died on September eighth, nineteen sixty-five, and was buried within hearing of a secondary freight line of the Long Island Railroad—the old promoter would have screamed in protest, “This was unfair; the trains should have come first!”

And great job as always by Robbie, and a special thanks to Bill Bryke, to have done what Cowen managed to do, which is to create one of the great toys of the twentieth century, ranked number four. The story of Joshua Lionel Cowen, in the end, the story of the Lionel Toy Train. Here on Our American Stories.